Facebook is Myanmar’s dominant media platform. Now the country is again a dictatorship. In 2018, Facebook banned commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing for his role in the expulsion of the Rohingya. Now, as the country’s new dictator, he temporarily shuts down Facebook. Myanmar’s many conflicts have given Facebook director Mark Zuckerberg one headache after another. He… Read more »
Category: Media
The individual, the national, and the global: New connections in times of China-US confrontation
As the ongoing confrontation between the US and China has entered the technological and digital realms, we are pushed to rethink the relationship between individuals, nations and the entire world as more fluid than it has ever been before. While we grapple with these changes, the EU is on the right path ahead, but other… Read more »
The Pitfalls of Societal Impact in a Politicized Environment: An Example from the Corona Era
The British magazine The Spectator referred to research published in Norway to back up the magazine’s claim that societal lockdowns are not an effective means to reduce the spread of COVID-19 infections. This unlikely occurrence highlights some of the difficulties in ensuring that research has a societal impact. Funders and taxpayers reasonably expect that research… Read more »
The Other Side of Facebook in Myanmar
Facebook has been making headlines this year with what seems like scandal after scandal, from the Cambridge Analytica data breach to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the United States Congress as a result. But perhaps one of the most serious scandals has been the social media platform’s role in Myanmar in spreading… Read more »
The Sargentini Report and Hungary: How to Shape a Parallel Reality
Hungary is in the international spotlight again. On 12 September 2018, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Sargentini report – named after the author, the Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini– with a two-thirds majority. The report called for the activation of Article 7 (1) of the Treaty on European Union which can lead to… Read more »
Performing Grief
As we discuss the relationship between public and private mourning and grief, consider the emotional handling of the Newtown school shooting in 2012, where twenty children were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school. Such a traumatic event destabilizes people, creating a felt deficit in emotional support. When President Obama visited the community, his role was… Read more »
How comics can make the Arab world a better place
Most Arab countries today are governed by more or less authoritarian regimes that nourish a patriarchal social and political order. This order marginalizes young people, and particularly women. There are moments when it is openly challenged. We saw it across the Arab world in 2011 and afterwards. Several art forms contributed to this open conflict,… Read more »
Trump and Threats to Truth, Democracy and Peace
Stein Tønnesson delivered this year’s The Fjord Memorial Lecture at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. The lecture discusses Trump’s team of advisors, calls for fighting the increasing use of lies in political campaigning, sees Trump’s election as having weakened democracy worldwide, and perceives a major risk to world peace. Tønnesson ends the lecture… Read more »
On Bullshit and Research
Researchers who write articles or give interviews must be given approval rights over how their material is presented. My year as an academic has been bookended by a couple of awkward encounters between my own research and a new media reality. The year has also provided a rich crop of angry messages from strangers in… Read more »
A Bug in the System
Palestine does not exist on the map and is also not easy to find in the jam-packed schedules of diplomats working with the Middle East. A Twitter storm was unleashed a couple of weeks ago when rumours spread among pro-Palestinian activists that Google had removed Palestine from its mapping service. The internet ignited as only… Read more »